Fit to borscht – An Irishman’s Diary about a Polish-Irish wedding

Everybody warns you about the vodka at traditional Polish weddings. The fact that the event will last two days is also mentioned in briefings. What you’re probably not prepared for – although nothing could prepare you – is the food.

It comes in waves – beef dishes, chicken dishes, lamb dishes, salad plates, pickles. There are occasional ceasefires, sometimes lasting up to an hour, when you think the hotel’s resources have been exhausted. Then, just as you relax, chefs will emerge from the kitchens, with dramatic backing music, to perform synchronised ham-carving for the next course.

And if, like me, you’ve had a traditional Irish upbringing, which involved threats of “you’d eat that if you were in Africa”, you will feel under pressure to clear every plate the Poles put before you.

But if you did that, probably, you would die. Or even worse, you would embarrass the hosts. Because a central rule of Polish wedding-feast economics, clearly, is that demand should never be allowed to catch up with supply.

The vodka is a challenge too, despite the warnings. They don’t sip it at Polish weddings – they drink in shots, at regular intervals, but according to rules and rhythms of which Irish people know nothing.

Our happy couple (Polish bride, Irish groom) had made a wise decision that there would be no pints served at the table. That way lay culture-clash disaster, they knew.

There were, however, unlimited wine and soft drinks as required.

So an hour or two into the celebrations, the vodka bottles on our (all-Irish) table were still untouched. They sat there, like unexploded hand grenades – nobody wanting to pull the pins for fear of unleashing terrible consequences.

When a Polish friend queried this, it was explained that we were awaiting some signal – a toast to the bridesmaids, perhaps. But that’s when we learned that there would be no formal toasts, and (gasp!) no speeches of any kind during the day.

It was up to each table when and how often the vodka should be opened. But as was pointed out, the Polish were already several shots ahead. So, even though it seemed a recipe for anarchy, we unscrewed a bottle top, nervously, and fired our first volley.

There was in fact method to the way the locals drank. No shot went unaccompanied by a diluting chaser. And of course the ubiquitous food kept the vodka in balance. In the extremely unlikely event you didn’t have a full plate before you at any moment, there was a self-service dessert table, piled high and constantly replenished.

The savoury dishes kept coming, meanwhile, including a late-night hot drink we thought was Bovril but turned out to be the famous borscht – a beetroot soup that could revive the dead. This and other aids kept most guests upright until 4am.

By then, another thing we had noticed about the Poles is that they can all dance. In fact, the visitors were intimidated by their footwork early on, leaving them the floor until the local band launched into a version of Galway Girl which, for lowering Irish inhibitions, seems to work at least as well as vodka.

Thereafter the cultural gulf between Laois (where most Irish guests came from) and Lower Silesia was bridged by the universal language of jiving.

If there was a low point, it was when, circa 2am, the visitors attempted to organise a Siege of Ennis. This looked less like a siege and more like the Battle of Waterloo (where the Polish and Irish also faced off), with ill-timed cavalry charges and general mayhem.

Still, as the visitors retired for the night (we were staying in the same hotel, upstairs) there was, I think, unspoken relief that we hadn’t made a complete show of ourselves.

A key difference between the Battle of Waterloo and a Polish wedding, however, is that, as noted earlier, the wedding lasts two days. We were well warned about this. And yet there was a generalised assumption that we could turn up for the second instalment at random.

Au contraire. Around the time on Sunday when, at the Irish equivalent, guests might be weighing the options of a sleep-in or a recovery fry, word spread that the Poles were already seated for Day Two and that their visitors were embarrassingly scarce.

A critical mass was assembled at haste. And it was indeed still mass time, more or less, when we trooped downstairs. But sure enough, the vodka was already flowing, the waiters were in overdrive, and – incredibly – the whole thing was starting again.

@FrankmcnallyIT fmcnally@irishtimes.com